Taking the photo shoots in halong bay of the skyline at night

Okay. Well, we're here. It's the city at night and, you know what? There's probably not a more iconic view than where we are right now.We're on the boat of halong party cruise and we're looking out at beautiful thien cung cave as the light dims. I brought with me, of course, a really strong tripod. I think it's really important to have a nice ball head that allows you to quickly and solidly get into a position that you want. I decided to use my 24-70 because we're a little bit restricted as is not surprising.

I'm not the only photographer here. I think that guy has my spot, but that's okay, I'll find another spot. There's plenty of room to get this beautiful shot. I brought with me a little bit of a flashlight here because that helps when you're at night. A lot of the cameras, if you move the switch, they have a little illumination that allows you to see the controls, but it doesn't really help for the outside controls. So I think this really helps. I'm going to use live view for this and I'll explain why in just a little bit, but right now, I'm going to get into position and see what I could figure out and compose.

Okay, I'm going to try and sneak a few shots before I get into the more teaching points. So I kind of, I'm using these things that are jetting out compositionally to be able to have something in the foreground that kind of makes it a little bit more interesting. I don't want to cut the image in half, so I want to sort of have it, you know the rule of thirds. I say there are no rules, really, but when it comes to it, you know the rules are there because they work a lot of the time and it's a little hard to see here.

You know, it's interesting to me because even when I'm on a tripod here doing these long exposures, I still can be a little bit rushed because the light is changing really quickly. So, just like in the day time, when I'm on the street and life is moving very fast on a tripod as the light is constantly changing, I want to move fast too, and that's why I was kind of in a hurry to get the shots before the light changed anymore and, you know, that's just the nature of the game. So I'm able to sneak a few more frames.

I mean, moments matter, even when you're on a tripod doing long exposures for the city at night. I'm always checking my histogram because I want to make sure I'm not blowing out highlights that I don't want to blow out.

I love what the slow exposure does to the water. It's really cool. Well, I think we got away with this. Now I'm just going to go back to the other side of the fence and now I'll continue the conversation. Okay, well, I'm in live view. There's a lot of good reasons to use live view and you're going to see in just a second that it has a lot of advantages when you're on a tripod using live view.

But the number one reason I'm using it is, I've got a high resolution camera. This camera's 36 mega-pixels. Even the mirror going up and down is going to create maybe a little bit of vibration that's going to hurt the sharpness in some way. In live view, the mirror's already up, so you don't get that mirror slap. A lot of times you can lock up the mirror, but I don't want to do that because I want to see the scene. So, because I'm in a tripod I don't really want to touch the camera because again, that might compromise my sharpness just the fact that I touch it.

So I'm going to use a remote, but I wanted to show you a lot of cameras have a feature and it's called Exposure Delay Mode. I can set the camera to a three second exposure delay, so that when I take the picture by touching the camera, it waits three seconds, allows the camera to settle for an absolute sharp, sharp image. It's a long exposure, so it's going to take a little bit of time for it to work, but when the exposure is open it comes back to live view.

The reason I like live view aside from the fact that the mirror is up, which is a quality issue is, I have all the information I need. I can set my aperture. I know how long my exposure's going to be. It's pretty dark here. I'm down at ISO 64, which is the sweet spot. On most camerasthe lowest number is the maximum dynamic range and because shutter speeds aren't important to me now, because I'm in this tripod, why not take advantage of the absolute highest quality. When I'm focusing with live view, I can magnify the image.

I can magnify the image and when I focus, when I get that green bar, I know exactly what I wanted to be sharp is going to be sharp. So when I take that picture, it's going to be sharp, which is fantastic. There's also a couple of other features on a lot of the cameras that give you the grid system that allows you and helps you when you're composing the image. Some of them have a live histogram. Of course, in a night scene, the histogram's going to be weighted to the far left because there's a lot of dark tones and that's what you want.

So you want to make sure your exposure is good. So, in live view, you have all the possibilities. You can see the image. You can even level the camera. So, it makes it a lot easier when you're shooting, rather than looking through the view finder, I find. But the number one reason isyou're not going to have the mirror slap and that's going to help you because a lot of cameras now are high resolution. Alright, well I'm gonna start taking a few frames here.

The awkward silence is inevitable with long exposures. Wow, that looks pretty beautiful, doesn't it? Alright, well, you know this location is amazing, but close to here there's a lot of other great locations and since we're here we might as well take advantage of the fact that, you know, who knows when we're going to be here again and when you're doing the city at night, whatever city it is, if it's a city you don't live in,you want to kind of maximize the opportunities. So that's what we'll do.